Ian Scott Massie's Blog

Well its the turning of the year here in Masham in Yorkshire but, instead of some winters when we've been knee deep in snow, its just a grey rainy day.

So I've been working away at some changes to my website - putting up details of the next exhibitions coming up, scanning and photographing work for some new picture pages and deleting the details of 2013's events.

Its been a great year. I finished my book Tales of the Dales in time for the exhibition of the same name in the summer and also my children's book The Penhill Giant.

The weather was mixed for much of the year but I managed some great painting trips.

So many people gave me new stories during the Tales of the Dales that I've started working on a new book and I've got some new paintings planned for my next exhibition in May.

Here are the links if you want to catch up with what's coming in 2014:

There are some beautiful skies - morning and evening - at this time of year in the North of England. The colours are just amazing and often have me reaching for a favourite poem - Elegy in a Country Churchyard. Written by Thomas Gray at a church on the outskirts of Slough, where I spent my teenage years, its images have resonated in my imagination for a long time.

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,The plowman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

Now fades the glimm'ring landscape on the sight, And all the air a solemn stillness holds,Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight, And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds;

Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tow'r The moping owl does to the moon complainOf such, as wand'ring near her secret bow'r, Molest her ancient solitary reign.

Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade, Where heaves the turf in many a mould'ring heap,Each in his narrow cell for ever laid, The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.

I like the five beat rhythm of the lines, the language (solemn stillness,drowsy tinklings) but above all I like it because I when I stand in a country churchyard I think and feel so many of the same things. Although Gray was writing in the eighteenth century churchyards are not so very different now.